Page 180 - Sport Culture and the Media

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magazine Cosmopolitan declared at the top of its front cover the exciting
promise of ‘SPORTING BODIES: 23 MALE ATHLETES – NAKED!’. In fact,
many of the athletes were semi-clothed and, as the text described what they
considered to be their greatest sporting moment, there was much hyperactivity
as well as artful concealment of genitalia. No pretence was made that this was
anything other than a ‘scopophilic’ exercise (that is, indulging in the pleasure of
looking), with the photospread opening with the following text:
Sport? Boring? Not any more. Forget Leo and Brad. When the Olympics
roll around next year, we know which guys we’ll be watching as closely as
possible. On the track, on the field, in the pool and on the podium, these
are the hottest bodies you’re ever likely to see.
(Cosmopolitan 1999: 195)
On the page opposite this text is an advertisement for Desire, an anti-perspirant
endorsed with an image of athlete Heather Turland as a long-distance ‘Mum on
the run’! (p. 194). Thus, while the photospread may involve an unusually direct
sexualization of the male athletic body, there are still strong traces of the
conventional order in the article’s lack of interest in their paternal status (and
its contiguous advertisement’s mention of a female athlete’s maternal role).
The nature of this gaze on the male sports body can be further complicated
by the ‘seeping’ of information into the frame from outside the world of sport.
Take, for example, the cover of Guttmann’s (1996) The Erotic in Sports, which
is a reproduction of a striking Sports Illustrated photograph of the finely tuned
body of US Olympic diver Greg Louganis entering the water in a perfect,
aesthetically appealing and, for many, no doubt erotically pleasing dive. The
viewer’s reading of the photograph is, however, almost certainly changed by
being in possession of the information that after retirement Louganis declared
his homosexuality and HIV-positive status (a condition which he admitted to
having when he bled from a head wound into the Olympic pool). In other
words, the still sports photographic image is never entirely ‘still’; it is always
subject to revision and reformulation according to prevailing social ideologies
and the circulation of cultural ‘data’.
Similarly disruptive to the ‘orderly’ containment of images of traditional
sports masculinity in the media are cases like that of another rugby league
player, Ian Roberts, where the pictured Adonis came out as gay during his
playing career after appearing nude in a gay magazine. The appearance of Ian
Roberts in the inaugural issue of Blue Magazine in 1994 indicates the extent to
which, once ‘let off the leash’, the photographic representation of prominent
sportsmen can travel to some previously unexplored spaces. Roberts, a player
famed for his formidable physique and toughness, had allowed his body to be
used as a ‘sexual ornament’ before, most notably in the heterosexually targeted